ISSUE 2.1

Becoming A Star

Hallo! This one's all about the stars. Like, literally, but also fame and stuff. (Also divining rods.) See? I did a pun! Anyway, here's a song: Emancipator - Bat Country. You'll likely to be as pleased as I am that Emancipator (if you've already heard them before) did not, in fact, jump the shark into predictable chillectro and continued to add creative elements that makes it fresh. A worthy song.

Space art. I like this. You don't even need my commentary, right? This is pretty badass. It looks like a giant monolith/lawn dart/hiltless sword. "It's a useless satellite, serving no purpose beyond the A E S T H E T I C." (Emphasis mine.) This should be going live around April 2018--and hey, good news, it'll disintegrate after about two months. Honestly, I'm kind of bummed. I'd love for that sucker to be up there for like, two years. Then again--space trash. But this is a pretty real thing: if we manage to become a space-faring race, just how much of space might be taken up by art? I always imagine space as cold, lifeless, sterile, full of nothing but capitalist and mercenarial ships, working to extract the resources from the entire solar system. But artists are born as well as made, and they're not going to not fill the sky with useless, incredibly beautiful junk. Maybe in the future... art planets.

In other monolithic news, Vice is being completely silly and referring to the massive monolithic sign of our planetary evolution as a "spliff"-shaped asteroid when really this is clearly going to deliver us from everything bad that's happening, since it's the first interstellar object of its kind. Right? Right?? OK, maybe not. But hey, at least it's pretty cool--and we just noticed it. It also has a sweet name, Oumuamua, which is "messenger" in Hawaiian.

There is something inexplicably compelling to me about the idea of large corporations politely yet persistently defending an ancient, scientifically disproven, mystical art used to find water. They say, fairly reasonably, that "some of the older methods are just as effective than [sic] the new ones, but we do use drones as well, and now satellites." Drones--satellites--dowsing rods. Isn't that delightful? The most interesting thing to me here is that nine out of eleven companies polled confirmed that they use water dowsing, some of them defending it by basically saying, "hey, it's just like one person with rods wandering around a forest, it's not that expensive in comparison to satellites". As far as I'm concerned... if your science-says-it's-just-as-good-as-guesswork method works well enough to employ someone to actually wander a forest with dowsing rods, you do you, megacorporation. At least you make me feel like you're not trying to bring on a Minority Report future.

The internet is a tough place. Did you know I used to be an anonymous internet writer on Tumblr? Yeah, it's true. I wasn't bad. (I wasn't great, either, though.) Here's the thing: this guy's poetry is bad. I mean, compared to, you know, the most famous poets who ever lived. Mediocrity is a difficult reality and discussion to navigate, especially on the internet, where mediocrity can achieve a local minima, pooling in seclusion with other people who think that your mediocre stuff is actually pretty good and deep. That is, until someone busts you wide open on Twitter and a bunch of liberal arts majors make parodies of you. (Not that there's anything wrong with liberal arts, majors, mind--I went to an art school, which is far worse. Just that they have more of the context to know that your local minima is significantly under the global maxima, unlike Mr. MBA.)

Of course, this situation is a little different. It's not just that Collin Yost dared to put self-absorbed-but-not-amazing-enough-to-get-away-with-it poetry on the internet. Collin Yost's true crime here, in my mind, is pretentiousness. The cigarettes, the typewriter, putting typewriter text on Instagram and polishing work that simply isn't worthy of that kind of polish--and even if it were, I'd side-eye any poet who didn't feel like they could stand by their work without a cigarette next by it. But see, here, I'm still being bit of a hating dick. This article is a deeper look at the actual person Mr. Yost is, who used his poetry to deal with anxiety and was urged to publish on Instagram by his friends, but also a fair critique of a fairly average, "hyper-masculine", misogynistic poet. Crap. There I go hating, again. My point is: what do you do when you just aren't that good? There's an interesting and potentially terrifying tension to be navigated here, wrapped up in success, ego, approval, fame, failure, and the sometimes vicious, amplifying effect of the internet.

Let's take a quick break from feeling bad about mediocrity and gaze at this absolute trash fire of hilarity. The CEO of HQ, a live trivia app, is extremely territorial about his star personality, Scott Rogowsky, insisting that things like "Rogowsky was absolutely not allowed to say that he "enjoys making people happy and giving them the trivia they want" and "he cannot say that people want trivia". The entire article seems to have been spawned off just trying to get a conversation with the personality himself. The second half of the article is an interesting little look into how the internet can grant us celebrity, and how Scott now gets recognized everywhere. Which is weird, in comparison to how it used to work--before it was movies or TV that everyone could access, and now ever smaller and smaller subcultures and groups centered around individual apps can create their own subcultures of fame and notoriety with no limit to scale (unlike IRL subcultures). The splintering of the world continues.

I mean. Do you ever think about this? I don't know 100% for sure that the world isn't flat. Like, I believe that the world is round. But you never know unless you look for yourself. Literally all scientists and all of written history could be a massive conspiracy designed to keep me, Way Spurr-Chen, from ever finding out what is actually at the end of the universe. Y'know? It's like--this dude actually went out, and built himself a rocket so he could see it with his own eyes. And I respect that. I just hope he doesn't die. Shout out to websterwade for sharing this one. (Oh my god. I wrote all of this before actually reading the details of the article. This does not seem like it will go... well.)

Way's Notes

HI!

Fuck. I don't know what's going on this weekend. Did you have a good Thanksgiving? I did! Like a true Texan, I went to Luby's with my family. Ate way too much, put on a few pounds I'm sure, but who's counting? (I'm not counting. I should be counting.) I feel like I've been getting weirder and weirder and weirder. I wish it were in a more technologically obscure way, since that would fit the newsletter, but no: it's this unsettling yet encouraging sensation that reality isn't what it seems. And I don't mean in a "it's all lizard people man, they're controlling everything" way--although, you know, who knows? Nah, it's more of a "maybe all this technology shit isn't so great after all and it'd be cool if we had more tribal-style groupings and wise elder types to teach us how to value human life" sort of way.

I'm trying not to spin off into sensation[alism], but here's what I've figured: my current model of reality has been, pragmatically, unsatisfying. Understanding reality's complexities by trying to grasp statistics, data, unreproducible social science delivered to me by scientists who may or may not be backed by corporate agendas, has not made it easier for me to extract meaning or value from my life. I always found my way to the "intuition" of complexity, even an intuition over computers, how they "feel". Configurations of information have a tactile sense, like knowing the way an application was probably programmed just by the nature of the bug (if you're privileged enough to know enough about programming to sense it). Knowledge feeds into intuition and gut. Not just explicit, discrete knowledge, though--accumulated knowledge, unconsciously skimmed and harvested from your experience gives you an understanding of reality that is specific to you.

What I'm trying to say here, is--hardcore rationality is no longer working for me, nor is trust in any sort of authority of what knowledge truly is. Different models of thinking are required, and sometimes the pragmatics of a matter is as simple as how it makes you feel. So all this to say--are your models helping you enjoy, and succeed at life? Or do they help you be helpless?

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